845 



BARONAGE. 



BARONAGE. 



040 



similar in their nature, though different in their object, to the life 

 baronies of the bishops. It is unnecessary to enter into any examina- 

 tion of the privileges of the barons, which in no respect differ from 

 those of the other component parts of the House of Peers. [PEERS 

 or THE REALM.] 



The principal writers upon the subject of this article are, John 

 Selden, in his work entitled ' Titles of Honour," first published in 1614 ; 

 Sir Henry Spelman, hi his work entitled ' Archseologus, in modum 

 Glossarii,' folio, 1626; Sir William Dugdale, in his 'Baronage of 

 England,' 3 volumes folio, 1675 and 1676 ; and in his ' Perfect Copy of 

 all Summonses of the Nobility to the Great Councils and Parliament 

 of this Realm, from the 49th of Henry III., until these present times/ 

 folio, 1685; ' Proceedings, Precedents, and Arguments on Claims and 

 Controversies concerning Baronies by Writ, and other Honours,' by 

 Arthur Collins, Esq., folio, 1 734 ; ' A Treatise on the Origin and Nature 

 of Dignities or Titles of Honour,' by William Cruise, 8vo., 2nd edit., 

 1823 ; 'Report on the Proceedings on the Claim to the Barony of 

 Lisle, in the House of Lords,' by Sir N. H. Nicolas, 8vo., 1829. But 

 the most complete, though not always correct, information on this 

 subject is contained in the printed ' Report from the Lords' Com- 

 mittees, appointed to search the Journals of the House, and Rolls of 

 Parliament, and other Records and Documents, for all matters touching 

 the Dignity of a Peer of the Realm.' 



The word Barmy is used in the preceding article only in its sense of 

 a dignity inherent in a person : but the ancient law-writers speak of 

 persons holding lands by barony, which means by the service of attend- 

 ing the king in his courts as barons. The research of the Lords' 

 Committees has not enabled them to trace out any specific distinction 

 between what is called a tenure by barony and a tenure by military 

 and other services incident to a tenancy in chief. The Hiltons in the 

 North, who held by barony, have been frequently called the Barons of 

 Hilton ; but whether in virtue of their territorial barony, or of their 

 summons to Parliament, it is difficult to say. They received writs of 

 summons to Parliament, and sittings can be shown in more than one 

 instance under such writs. A peerage of Parliament has therefore been 

 created, descendible to the heir general of the body of the person first 

 summoned, namely, Robert de Hilton, temp. Edw. I., and is now in 

 abeyance between the co-heirs of the Baron of Hilton who sat last in 

 Parliament. Burford, in Shropshire, is also called a barony, and its 

 former lords, the Cornwalls, who were an illegitimate branch of the 

 royal house of England, were called, in instruments of authority, 

 Barons of Burford, but they never had a summons to Parliament, nor 

 privilege of peerage. Barony is also sometimes, but rarely, used in 

 England for the lands which form the tenancy of a baron, and especially 

 when the baron has any kind of territorial addition to his name taken 

 from the place, and is not summoned merely by his Christian and 

 surname. This seems, however, to be done rather in common parlance 

 than as if it were one of the established local designations of the 

 country. The head of a barony (caput baronice) is, however, an acknow- 

 ledged and well-defined term. It designates the castle or chief house 

 of the baron, the place in which his courts were held, where the 

 services of his tenants were rendered, and where, in fact, he resided. 

 The castles of England were heads of baronies, and there was this 

 peculiarity respecting them, that they could not be put in dower, 

 and that if it happened that the lands were to be partitioned among 

 co-heiresses, the head of the barony was not to be dismembered, but to 

 pass entire to some one of the sisters. 



Barony is used in Ireland for a subdivision of the counties, equi- 

 valent to what is meant by hundred or wapentake in England. 



It remains to notice a few peculiar uses of the word baron : 



1. The chief citizens of London, York, and of some other places 

 in which the citizens possess peculiar franchises, are called in early 

 charters not unfrequently by the name of ' the barons' of the place. 

 This may arise either from the circumstance of the persons only being 

 intended who were the chief men of the place ; or that they were, in 

 fact, barons, homagers of the king, bound to certain suit and service to 

 the king, as it is known the citizens of London were and still are. 



2. The Baroni of the Cinque Parts are so called, probably for the 

 name reason that the citizens of London and of other privileged places 

 are so called. The Cinque Ports, which were Hastings, Dover, Hythe, 

 Romney, and Sandwich (to which afterwards Rye and Winchelsea were 

 added), being ports opposite to France, were regarded by the early 

 kings as places of great importance, and were consequently put under a 

 peculiar governance, and endowed with peculiar privileges. The free- 

 men of these ports were barons of the king, and they had the service 

 imposed upon them of bearing the canopy over the head of the king on 

 the day of his coronation. Here was the feudal service which marked 

 them a persons falling within the limits of the king's barons. Those 

 sent of themselves to Parliament, though sitting in the lower house, 

 might be expected to retain their appellation of barons. 



3-. Those persons who held lands in the island of Bute, in Scotland, 

 directly of the Marquis of Bute, the crown vassal, have long been 

 called Barons of Bute; a designation analogous probably in its origin 

 to the Barons of Chester. 



4. The Barons of the Exchequer. The judges in that court are so 

 called, one of them being the Chief Baron. The court was instituted 

 immediately after the Conquest, and it is probable that the judges 

 were so denominated from the beginning. They are called barons in 



ARTS AND SOI. DIV. VOL. I. 



the earliest Exchequer record, namely, the Pipe Roll of 31 Henry I. 

 [EXCHEQUER.] 



BA'RONAGE. This term is used, not so much to describe the 

 collective body of the barons in the restricted sense which now belongs 

 to the word, as signifying a component part of the hereditary nobility 

 of England, but the whole of that nobility taken collectively, without 

 regard to the distinction of dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, and 

 barons, all of whom form what is now sometimes called the baronage. 



In this sense the term is used in the title of one of the most 

 important works in the whole range of English historical literature, 

 for the sake of giving a short notice of which, we have introduced an 

 article under this word. We allude to ' The Baronage of England,' by 

 Sir William Dugdale, who was the Norroy King at Arms, and one of 

 the last survivors of those eminent antiquarian scholars who, in the 

 17th century, raised so high the reputation of England for that par- 

 ticular species of learning. 



Sir William Dugdale was the author of many other works, but his 

 history of the baronage of England is the one to which reference is 

 more frequently made ; and there is this peculiarity belonging to his 

 labours, that the Baronage is quoted by all subsequent writers as a 

 book of the highest authority; and it has, in fact, proved a great 

 reservoir of information concerning the families who, from the 

 beginning, have formed the baronage of England, from which all later 

 writers have drawn freely. 



The first volume was published in 1675; the second and third, 

 which form together a volume not so large as the first, in 1676. The 

 work professes to contain an account of all the families who had been 

 at any period barons by tenure, barons by writ of summons, or barons 

 by patent, together with all other families who had enjoyed titles of 

 higher dignity, beginning with the earl of the Saxon times. 



It was an undertaking of infinite labour, but Dugdale was an inde- 

 fatigable man. Nothing like it had before appeared. Accounts of the 

 higher orders of the English nobility had been given before his time 

 in the works of Milles,' Brooke, and Vincent, but these accounts are 

 excessively meagre, scarcely, in any instance, going beyond the state- 

 ment of genealogical particulars, or the most prominent facts in the 

 lives of the persons who had held those dignities. But Sir William 

 Dugdale has collected from the chronicles, from the chartularies of 

 religious houses, with which he became acquainted while preparing his 

 great work on the history of the monasteries, from the rolls of Parlia- 

 ment, in his time only to be perused in manuscript, and from the 

 public records, which he could consult only in the public repositories, 

 or in the extracts made from them by his fellow-labourers in historical 

 research, and finally from the wills in the various ecclesiastical offices 

 throughout the kingdom, the particulars of the lives of the most 

 eminent men of our nation. Without pretending to the graces of 

 language, and with the introduction of less of political or moral 

 reflection than perhaps might be desired, he has produced a work 

 which is not only rich beyond precedent in the most authentic 

 information, but which is read with interest and pleasure by all 

 persons who have any tincture of the spirit of historical inquiry. But 

 while he has thus clothed and almost animated the dry figures of the 

 earlier writers on the higher nobility of the realm, the accounts which 

 he has given of the persons who form the lower class, the barons, in 

 the stricter sense, whether by tenure, writ, or patent, are entirely his 

 own. Nothing before his time had been done to collect their names, 

 to show their origin, or to display their illustrious achievements. This 

 part of his work, that is, by far the larger portion of it, is pre-eminently 

 his own ; and the best tribute to its excellence is the fact to which we 

 have alluded above, that his accounts of these illustrious persons are 

 considered, by all subsequent writers, as genuine and authentic as if 

 he stood in the position of a contemporary chronicler, and that so few 

 persons have sines arisen who have shown themselves able to make 

 any addition of much value to the accounts which he lias left. 



Not the least merit of the work is the careful reference to autho- 

 rities, which renders it a most valuable book, not only to the student 

 in the family antiquities of the English nation, not only to those who 

 are delighted to read of the actions of the eminent persons of the 

 English nation in the days of chivalry, in the times of the Crusades, 

 and in the wars with France and Scotland; but to the practical man, 

 who undertakes to prosecute claims to baronies or other dignities, of 

 which there is always one or more before Parliament, and who finds 

 here the reference to the documents which it is necessary to produce 

 in the prosecution of such claims. 



This work contains some defects in respect of the general plan, in 

 which we find no sound criterion by which to determine the claims to 

 admission among those who are called barons by tenure. The arrange- 

 ment also admits of much improvement, and there are occasionally 

 mistakes and misrepresentations in the minuter details. Still nothing 

 has yet superseded it; but he who shall undertake the work of 

 re-modelling, correcting, improving, and continuing it to the present 

 day, will enter on his duty with advantages which his predecessor did 

 not enjoy. Some of the chief authorities on wliich Dugdale relied 

 have been printed by the Board of Commissioners on the Public 

 Records, and are now easily accessible to the historical inquirer, who 

 formerly was obliged to be content with slight inspections in ^the 

 offices in which the originals are deposited, or to depend on transcripts 

 which might not always be exact. 



3 P 



